Daniel O'Leary's fascinating new collection of dramatic poems combines scholarly recovery of early Canadian visionary experience, and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents, to create a series of dramatic settings presenting a revived Canadian poetic ethos. In The Lower Provinces, O'Leary rejects the notion as that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country's commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted, and instead The Lower Provinces presents an imaginative, and very frequently humourous, resume of convincingly reconstructed early Canadian voices who seem to reflect on our own rather than on historical time. This delightful book uses the past, but the present is its real subject. In both its vivid acts of visionary recovery, and in more satiric moments of faux antique pastiche, O'Leary's poetry trenchantly examines the claims of the present, and calls for a deeper appreciation of the insight surfacing from the well of the Canadian past.

Professor of Canadian Studies at Concordia in Montreal, Daniel O'Leary's poetry has appeared in Exile, Fiddlehead, the spoken-word anthology Poetry Nation, and in numerous other journals. Aside from an earlier book of poetry, The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères, he has published work on early Canadian print culture in The History of the Book in Canada and is co-editor with Jonathan Wisenthal of What Shaw Really Wrote About the War. A descendant of early Maritime Canadian families, O'Leary was born on New Brunswick's Fundy coast and was raised there and in Nova Scotia.

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